Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician — Volume 2 eBook

takes hold at once of your imagination and heart,
have penetrated, moved, enraptured 500 auditors, as
they do the eight or ten privileged persons who listen
to him religiously for whole hours; every moment
there were in the hall those electric fremissements,
those murmurs of ecstasy and astonishment which
are the bravos of the soul. Forward then, Chopin!
forward! let this triumph decide you; do not be selfish,
give your beautiful talent to all; consent to pass
for what you are; put an end to the great debate
which divides the artists; and when it shall be
asked who is the first pianist of Europe, Liszt
or Thalberg, let all the world reply, like those
who have heard you..."It is Chopin.”

Chopin’s artistic achievements, however, were
not unanimously received with such enthusiastic approval.
A writer in the less friendly La France musicale goes
even so far as to stultify himself by ridiculing,
a propos of the A flat Impromptu, the composer’s
style. This jackanapes—­who belongs
to that numerous class of critics whose smartness
of verbiage combined with obtuseness of judgment is
so well-known to the serious musical reader and so
thoroughly despised by him—­ignores the spiritual
contents of the work under discussion altogether, and
condemns without hesitation every means of expression
which in the slightest degree deviates from the time-honoured
standards. We are told that Chopin’s mode
of procedure in composing is this. He goes in
quest of an idea, writes, writes, modulates through
all the twenty-four keys, and, if the idea fails to
come, does without it and concludes the little piece
very nicely (tres-bien). And now, gentle reader,
ponder on this momentous and immeasurably sad fact:
of such a nature was, is, and ever will be the great
mass of criticism.